This month, we continue the revival of our 60 lb combat
robot, Troublemaker. Last time,
NiCad packs to lighter, higher energy
density LiPoly packs. While a battery
upgrade is undeniably practical, it
does not galvanize the imagination as
effectively as some other tweaks. This
time, we wanted to turn our gray
matter towards something a bit more
exciting — upgrading Troublemaker’s
weapon.

The endless possibilities of
weapon designs are some of the
most unique and irresistible parts of
combat robotics. In many ways, we
think it appeals to one of the most
basic elements of play that we all
enjoyed as kids one way or the other:
wreaking havoc and destruction.

More than that, we think that the
weapon is the centerpiece of the
core task of a combat robot — a task
far more complicated than its
tendency to be summarized through
onomatopoeia might suggest.

That task is to disable your
opponent which can be done in
myriad ways. A bot can be high
centered, flipped over, sent over the
edge of an arena, or have its batteries
ripped from its chest like a robotic
version of Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom. While this part of
the task seems to get the most
attention, there is
an equally
important aspect
that needs to be
considered: doing
any or all of these things to the
opponent without having your own
bot sustain commensurate damage.
It’s all about Newton’s Third Law
of Motion, and we wanted to
upgrade Troublemaker’s weapon so
that it would deal major damage to
opponents without suffering an equal
and opposite reaction of doom to
itself. This calls for some serious
physics.

Eye of the Brainstorm

There is always a lot to learn
from history, so it is important to
review the trials and travails of
Troublemaker’s record as a
competitive combot. When we were
first designing Troublemaker (then
known as Trilobot) in 2001, the first
step of our design process was to
determine that we wanted something

Twin Tweaks
by Bryce Woolley and Evan Woolley

Weapons of
Bot Destruction

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